


365

by ishka



Category: Free!
Genre: Angst, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 17:54:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5014348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishka/pseuds/ishka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Makoto thinks it should be enough time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	365

**Author's Note:**

> I heard [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ML0UOA6ww0) and was like "I should make a quick MakoRin angst out of this." That's all, that was the thought process.

“A year.”

“And you’re gone.”

“To the day. And I’m gone.”

Makoto smiles over his glass. “Should be enough time,” he jokes. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t throw it. Rin,” he offers with a grin.

“There we go. Now I don’t have to let a stranger into my house.”

“Something tells me you would’ve let me in anyway,” Rin suggests shamelessly with a quirk of his eyebrow and a sip of his drink.

Makoto laughs.

-

Rin is made of fire; Makoto likes to hold his hand over flames. 

The cheap laminate over particle board that makes up the countertops of his kitchen radiates warmth for the first time when he catches himself by his palms to steady his balance when Rin drops to his knees in front of him. The tatami doesn’t freeze his heart solid in his ribs with autumn’s infant chill when Rin shoves his chest flat against the floor with the heel of his hand dug deep between his shoulderblades. 

Rin leaves and Makoto examines his burns in the cold fluorescent light of his bathroom. He can hide them if he wants to, but he doesn’t.

Makoto calls him the next day. Rin lets himself in. 

-

There are still three-hundred and forty-four days, and it will be enough time.

“You shouldn’t let me stay the night.”

“Then you shouldn’t fall asleep in my bed.”

What he doesn’t tell him is that when Makoto tries to wake him, Rin finds his waist in his sleep and holds on. What he doesn’t tell him is that when he sleeps all of his bravado cracks and Makoto sees him underneath his fractures. What he doesn’t tell him is that he wants Rin to get the fuck away from him, because he doesn’t like what he sees peering back at him from beneath. 

But he doesn’t tell him any of this.

-

“A birthday boy,” Rin says with excitement. “Whatever could he want?”

“Only for you to stop saying that.”

Rin gets him flowers, many and they’re beautiful, but made up of too much variety. It’s impersonal, the meanings clash, and Makoto throws them away when he leaves only to dig them out of the trash the next morning.

-

One-hundred and eight bell rings, one-hundred and nine days later.

Makoto counts because he thinks it might line up, and wouldn’t that be sort of serendipitous? One-hundred and eight days of worldly desire shirked from his consciousness with the bell of the new year. He can begin again and leave Rin to his slumber, his dream, his many fractures. There’s still time to do so.

But the days don’t line up by one over and he misses his chance to let it go. 

\- 

“A birthday boy,” Makoto says with excitement. “Whatever could he want?”

Rin smiles because Makoto remembered.

Makoto also remembers he likes orange milk chocolates, but not any other kind, and gets him a small bar, since he won’t eat a lot of it.

He reminds Makoto he has swim practice, unfortunately, and that he will be back later. 

Makoto remembered that too.

Makoto commits to memory every curve of Rin’s face. Kisses him so often that his lips have submitted and formed to Rin’s own, and there are no gaps when they meet. He lies in wonderment at night after Rin falls asleep, knowing that there are neurological pathways carved out in his brain exclusively for these memories. Evidence of Rin that will remain long after he’s gone, the only concept of him that will exist in Makoto’s world, and every time he recalls him the smallest spark of electricity will travel these paths no matter how overgrown by time they might become.

It doesn’t make him feel any better, and he’s angry that his memory of citrus will now forever fork from Rin’s roads.

-

Rin ruins him. He is scorched earth over Makoto’s already parched land and when he’s done and gone to incinerate foreign lands, Makoto knows there won’t be anything left of himself to grow back.

His arms are a noose around Makoto’s neck and Rin only smiles, a softness in his eyes as he strangles Makoto of everything he thought could survive it.

And yet Makoto only sees himself in bloom.

It’s the first day of spring and Rin brings him roses. A very many roses and a very few thorns, in a transparent vase he sets on the nightstand in place of the lamp they broke the week prior. 

“For surviving the cold another year,” Rin tells him, now knowing Makoto despises the winter.

“They’re beautiful,” Makoto tells him, not wanting him to find out he now also despises the spring.

-

“I’ll get gold one day.”

“I know you will.”

“You’ll see me on TV.”

“How could I see anyone else?”

He doesn't want to talk about it, and Rin looks at him through his fractures that don’t go away anymore when he wakes up.

“You could come with me.”

“You know I can’t.”

Rin smiles like he gave it his best shot, and Makoto wishes he would fight him for it, get angry that he can’t go too, cry in mourning that this can’t go on forever.

But he doesn’t, so Makoto does it for him when Rin isn’t there.

-

It’s a walk in late summer over hot concrete that Makoto finally asks him.

“Why do you only smile when I say I can’t go?”

Rin stops walking and takes his hand. “One of us needs to be happy for you.”

-

Makoto has a bookcase with a shelf dedicated entirely to porcelain breakables he’s accumulated through the worldly travels of the Nanases, and he shatters every single one against the wall of his bathroom under the fluorescent light for every single day he has left with Rin: twelve. 

He sweeps up the pieces and drops them into the trash, the clink of the edges a calming trickle. 

Rin later slips on a piece Makoto missed and cuts his foot.

-

He can’t come over today.

He really needs to pack.

It’s only one large bag and a carry-on, but it takes him all day.

Rin fits his entire life into two bags.

And that’s where the difference is.

Makoto’s entire life requires the parameters of Iwatobi. The sea-worn sides of the buildings on the wharf are etched in his fears, the alleyways shadow his secrets, the hearths of the houses hang onto his hopes. He knows in his heart that there’s nowhere else for him to go, and he only wishes that his desires could also be contained by the same boundaries, but he doesn’t have enough of those to chase across the world and survive on alone.

-

Makoto tells him he can’t go one more time.

Rin doesn’t smile now, and instead he closes their distance. Makoto pins him to the bed and gives Rin something to take with him. He fills Rin’s lungs with sighs and grabs him with the intent of blooming over his hips with bruises resembling the variety of his birthday bouquet. After today, his lips will start to forget. The paths of his memories will stop forging new directions and the spark of remembering will only roll within the chasms already present, eroding deeper and deeper but never getting any newer. 

Rin’s fractures break to wide valleys, and like he feared nearly a year prior, Makoto sees only betrayal masquerading as love now that the picture is whole before him.

“I’ll never forgive you,” Makoto says quietly in the wake of Rin’s unearthing.

Rin finds his smile again. “I know. Makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

-

Makoto thinks Rin will keep walking through security, but he turns and stands and waits, half of his life on one shoulder, the other half on a truck to be loaded into his airplane.

“How long?” Makoto finally thinks to ask.

Rin looks down at the patterned tile for a moment and when he looks back up, he’s finally crying for Makoto. “A few years.”

Makoto takes a moment for himself, and looks for the regret he thought might be here by now, after so many opportunities to walk away before this moment could happen. He doesn’t find it.

“Should be enough time.”


End file.
